Author: Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, yet spent much of her youth living in Nova Scotia with her grandparents after her father died and her mother was committed to a mental institution. She returned to the United States to attend high school and, later, Vassar College, where she and a group of friends started the literary journal Con Spirito. After graduating, she traveled extensively in Europe and northern Africa. In 1938, she published her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry North and South, and in 1970 she received a National Book Award in Poetry for The Complete Poems.

Elizabeth Bishop

In this 1956 poem, Elizabeth Bishop (1911–79) uses the fixed form of the sestina to discuss the fixed form of seasons, as described by the almanac. How does Bishop use the structure of the poem to tell her story?